I had a disastrous night at the tango club last Saturday. I could tell it was going to be bad when I walked in the door and realized I had completely forgotten everything I had learned in eight weeks of lessons. Every dance was worse than the one before; I tripped, stumbled, cursed, and silently screamed my way across the floor, and by the time the evening was over it took every ounce of self-control I had not to cry in the car on the way home.

One of my instructors at cosmetology school also happens to be a salsa teacher, and I was talking to her about how hard Saturday night was for me. I told her that I was concentrating so hard on the steps and my posture and trying to keep up with my partner that I ended up completely confused and tangled up.

“Listen baby girl,” she told me. “Dancing is a lot like life. If you look down to see what your feet are doing, you’ll end up crashing into someone else. You need to listen to the music. Close your eyes, forget about your feet, and listen to the music, listen to the music, listen to the music.”

I spoke with my mother on the phone today, which is really never a good idea, and she told me something so hurtful, so awful, that I’ve found myself tossed completely overboard. The ship is long gone, and I am stranded and flailing in the dark water. This is not new. I should start calling this place the Ocean of Mom, considering the number of times an interaction with her has left me drowning. There are so many things I don’t understand, and she is one of them. I don’t understand how I could have fought so hard every day for so long to become a somewhat healthy human, and still find myself so gutted by this.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I never do. Someone once said, “Take the action, and the insight will follow.” I do this every moment of every day, and my god what a huge statement of faith that is. I must have faith, that must be what this is, because what kind of person walks blindly through their life unless they somehow believe that God will clear the path in front of them?

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find being a person extremely difficult. It would be so much easier to be a robot, say, or a sea urchin. Something with a nice, hard exoskeleton and no emotional attachments. It’s hard to feel things all the time, to choose growth and wellness and change, and that’s why I used to drink all the time. I would take a look at all that human, feel-y stuff people were doing and I would say, Oh hell no. Unfortunately that choice hurt more than it helped, so I’ve been trying to do it the other way for a while now. It’s hard, but I do it. And every day I trip, stumble, curse, and silently scream my way across the floor. I spend too much time looking at my feet, trying to anticipate the next step. And I frequently royally fuck things up. But I keep trying. And I keep reminding myself to close my eyes and listen to the music, listen to the music, listen to the music.